


Should Have Know You'd Bring Me Heartache

by Xanisis



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, mostly bc it's been so long since i read the books, one day i'm going to write something that's not sad, this follows more closely to the show verse, today is not that day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 13:33:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4265052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xanisis/pseuds/Xanisis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Theirs is a story told in almosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Should Have Know You'd Bring Me Heartache

Two knights are walking down a road.

The sun reflects off of their heads, bent towards each other, blonde strands almost but not quite mixing.

Theirs is a story told in almosts.

 

.

 

“Does it bother you?” she asks him once. “That they call you Kingslayer?”

“Does it bother you that they call you Beauty?” he retorts.

It is a cruel joke.

_Only one of these is true,_ she thinks, but does not say.

“You have your answer then,” he replies, but she doesn’t. Not really.

  


.

 

“You’re ridiculous, I hope you know that,” she tells him.

“You’re the one who suggested bandaging it,” he says, rolls his shoulder. The ripple of his muscles is both impressive and obnoxious. It seems an accurate description for him.

“Stop moving,” she says, places a hand on him to still the movement, feels the warmth of his skin pressing against her palm.

She feels her face heating, is glad for his turned back.

Perhaps she is a woman after all, she thinks, despite the whispers.

 

.

 

When she was a girl, she had dreamed of beautiful knights, of gallant men with a wave of blonde hair and Jaime Lannister’s face. But these were good men she dreamed of and he is not a good man.

She had thought that once.  

Now she isn’t sure.

 

.

 

“Brienne,” he says, like her name is a revelation, like he had meant to say another one.

“Yes?” she responds. It seems like the polite thing to say.

His eyes remind her of a song she heard once, too beautiful to be real.

“Nevermind,” he says, turns away.

 

.

 

“Was this how you had imagined your quest going?” he asks her, bitterness staining his voice.

He sways in his saddle, unsteady and sickly. She worries at each bump in the road.

“No,” she says, finally. She can never be less than honest. “I don’t know what I imagined, but it wasn’t this.”

 

.

 

“I’m not the man I once was,” he says.

She looks at him, at the dirt matted in his golden hair, at the rotting stump on his arm, at the slump of his shoulders and the hollows around his eyes.

“No,” she says. “You’re not.”

 

.

 

“Do you miss your home?” he asks her, the firelight reflecting off his face, highlighting the planes of his features, the lines of his cheekbone, his browbone, his lips.

Brienne thinks of the humid halls, of the jeering laughter, of the way people’s eyes had glossed over with judgement.

“No,” she says. “Do you?”

His eyes look far away and there’s something like longing painted across his every feature.

“No,” he says, a lie, but she lets him have it.

 

.

 

"Are you glad to be back?" she asks him.

He looks different now, cleaner and harder with a tightness to his face that doesn't suit him, and a downward turn to his eyes that makes Brienne suddenly, unspeakably sad.

Jaime pauses for a moment. Brienne thinks of the look in his eyes at the bathhouse, the way his mouth had warped around the word "Kingslayer", wonders when he'd started being Jaime in her head.

A maid rushes by them, hurried and frazzled, muttering countless apologies as she juggles piles of dirty linens.

"It's alright," Brienne says, steadying the girl.

And when she looks up, he's only a white blue in the distance. He never did answer her question.

 

.

 

"You love him, don't you?" a woman with Jaime's face asks her and she has no answer.

 

.

 

His hand brushes hers over the sword. It feels significant somehow. She wants it to last, wants to stay, but not here, not in King’s Landing under his sister and father's eye, with the Stark girls on their own and their mother's promise weighing her down, but with him. She wants to stay with him, how funny.

"I guess this is goodbye," he says and she's not sure if she's imagining the wistful look in his eyes.

"I guess it is," she says, softly, sadly.

She wants to say something else, something like _I'll miss you, I love you, you're not the man they think you are_ , but she just smiles, closed lipped, and turns to her horse.

She's always been better at fighting other people's battles.

 

.

 

A knight is walking down a road.

The sun reflects off her head, bent up towards the sky.

She does not think of him.

(A lie. But she lets herself have it.)

  
  
  
  



End file.
